Bayou Barbeque 2

As I was saying, I was at a bayou barbeque when suddenly two of our hosts returned with 2 hog-tied alligators. As a group of us gathered to see what would happen next, one of the hunters brought out a pistol and presented it to the crowd.

“Who wants the honor?”

“Holy shit,” I whispered. Those of us who were not amused simply watched in awe.

Typically, there was a guy in the crowd eager to step up and accept the offer. He took the pistol and the hunter showed him exactly where to put it, with the muzzle nestled near the base of the gator’s skull. I guess that’s the sweet spot. They look so indestructible in the wild, but one shot was all it took. The second gator barely even reacted, but followed shortly after. Despite my ambivalence on the matter, it still seemed appropriate that someone witness this with a proper sense of respect.

Before this starts sounding like a diatribe on the universal connection of all things or the bounty of the Earth Mother or something, let me make this one point clear: Alligators are dangerous and they breed pretty fast. When their population explodes they expand into new territory and they have no particular fear of humans. They’ve been known to hunt dogs and kill people, and the only way to keep their population under control is to keep it culled. What we were witnessing was neither a crime nor a sin, I just don’t think anyone should take pleasure in killing anything, so I wanted to approach the telling of this story with a certain reverie.

The hunters stuck their knives in the bullet holes and bore into them as deep as they would go just to be sure. You can’t be too careful, I guess. The gators were still moving, but I think it was some kind of spasm. They looked like they were deflating as their bodies relaxed, like a tire losing air. I took my friend’s camera and snapped some pictures as the blood pooled on the concrete floor. It’s ghoulish, I know, but I consider myself a collector of experience. A thing like this should be documented because a description after the fact would simply be insufficient.

What happened next was something out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Once the gators were cut loose, one of the hunters pulled a chain down from the ceiling with a giant hook at the end. Rigging them to this chain in a manner I must admit to having not watched, they hauled the carcasses up off the ground. After a few more pictures, the doors to another room swung open and they dragged them into it by means of a track along the ceiling to which the chain was attached.

If I’m lucky in this life, I will never see what happens in a room like that. The hunters took the gators in and closed the door, and to my knowledge there was no further spectating or picture-taking from that point on.

“That’s the fast-track to fucked-up,” I told my friends solemnly as the gators disappeared from view. I took pictures of the blood on the floor until they hosed it back out into the swamp.

One of the girls taking pictures was a painter looking to make this moment the subject of future works. We all laughed about the strangeness of it, which is what people like us do in such situations.

“Isn’t this how horror movies always start?” she asked.

“No doubt,” I agreed. “Bunch of kids, a weird house in the woods, something fucked up happens, then it’s here come the hill mutants.”

But there weren’t any hill mutants. The people there were all friendly and inviting. They had given us nothing but food and hospitality. And as gruesome a thing as this gangland-style slaying of the alligators may sound, they had probably made life a little safer for the people in the area.

I’m not a hypocrite. You can’t eat the meat off something’s bones the way we tore into those ribs and then turn your nose up at the method that was used to procure it. I’ve been shark fishing before, and pulled one out of the water so it could be beheaded and gutted right there on the beach (it is necessary to clean sharks immediately because otherwise they will urinate through their skin and spoil the meat, I was told). I could not have been happier to take it home and cook every last bit of it and eat it. And sharks have lasted the test of time just as the alligators. But just the same, the spectacle of it was unsettling for me. And as is custom when witnessing something unsettling, I am now inclined to share that experience with you.

After this everyone retired again to the lodge, where some of the guys set up instruments upstairs and started playing music. My exhaustion was finally setting in, so I sat back on a couch and nearly fell asleep. We headed out shortly after.

Looking through my friend’s camera, we laughed at the dichotomy of sentiment the pictures stored there represented. Half of the pictures were from the wedding we had attended that same weekend, followed by one really cheery snapshot taken before embarking on this excursion. The rest documented the carnage of the gator killing.

“If we were killed in the woods and this camera were all they found,” I said, “that would tell quite a story.”

The ride home offered the horror movie landscape that had earlier been promised. Where the road was not consumed by the overhanging foliage it simply disappeared into the darkness.

“I’d love to have a place out here,” my friend said merrily. It was pretty cool. Not terribly convenient to work though.

This is the kind of place where werewolf sightings happen, I thought to myself on the way back. The swamp seemed perfectly suited to serve as the backdrop for a backwoods testimonial where some hayseed is insisting that whatever he saw wasn’t a bear because it was walking on two legs.

“I’m a hunter,” they always say, “I know what a bear looks like, and this was not a bear.”

We bantered on this point a few minutes until we were safely returned to the familiar civility of the highway, then we made our way back home without incident.